12-14092013
I am bothered by a choir audition I
went to, which is one of the things I mentioned in my previous post. I was surprised by the fact that I got nervous in the
audition, and as I was nervous and my core muscles were trembling, my
singing wasn't the best it can be and my voice was shaking a little.
There are two points here to look at: a) why I got nervous at all,
and b) why I take “failure” so harshly.
After years and years of practice in
performing I rarely get as nervous anymore as I did yesterday. Mostly
I can trust myself to know what I'm doing and to figure it out if I
don't. I wasn't nervous about the audition until I heard that a
friend of mine would be in the jury. The fact that there was
something personal on the line increased the “stakes”: convincing
someone I know personally of my skill, of my value, is more important
to me than convincing a roomful of strangers. This is why I would,
for example, have my most “special” friends come see me
perform something rather than have a hundred strange faces looking at me. This
is because my attachment/attraction towards a person makes them
appear “more important”: both failure and success feel “bigger”,
because I believe I risk losing the appreciation and company of a
friend if I fail in their presence, and on the other end I believe
that if I succeed in their eyes I will confirm and strengthen the
relationship.
This starting point led me to
interpreting the reactions of the jury through my fear of failure /
desire to succeed. Certain expressions that I interpreted as
“judgmental” or “not impressed” are flashing in my mind again
and again like snapshots, and I realize that these memory-images in
my mind are not an actual photographic evidence of what the situation
was in reality. I realize that what I'm carrying with me and holding
onto as “signs” of my “failure” are not in fact what
happened, but my filtered view of what I perceive and believe to have
happened – random moments that I decided to burn into my memory
because of what I believe I saw in them.
One reason this bothers me so is that I
have to wait for the results of the audition for two weeks. If I would get the
results straight away I could use them to determine whether I
“succeeded” or “failed”. So instead of finding balance
through self-honest self-assessment I torture myself with insecurity.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to judge myself for getting nervous, thinking that
I “should have” not been nervous because I've had a lot of
practice in performing, not realizing that I am whipping myself for
not living up to an ideal I have created for myself – the
self-image I would like to be for real – and that when I am
goal-oriented I only see the end result and not how to get there,
which ends up with me trying to force myself into a mold I don't know
how to fit myself into, like trying to shove a cube into a round
hole.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to hate myself for getting nervous, getting
disappointed with myself for not living up to my own expectations,
not realizing that my expectations were constructed on assumptions
that did not take into account all the factors there are to a
situation (for example, all the hidden points I am not yet aware of)
and that my expectations are thus always bound to be flawed one way
or another.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to expect various things out of myself and from
others, not realizing that my expectations are never exactly correct
– at best they're my best guess – and that as I live according to
my expectations I bind myself to inevitable disappointment.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to expect that after several years of practice in
performing I should have already mastered it, not realizing that
because performance in its essence is to reveal myself to others –
which constantly reveals new aspects of myself to myself - it is a life-long
process that I can probably never during this life be entirely “done”
with, let alone in a couple of decades.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to react to the information that my friend would
be in the jury, from that moment onwards accepting and allowing my
reaction to accumulate into underlying nervousness which reached its
peak during the audition.
--
Here I walked the point of my
relationship towards this friend in specific SF in private. It helped me see why
exactly his presence got me nervous: without going into details I was
hiding my experience about this person from myself and thus silently
accumulated the energy of that experience until it erupted in an
uncontrollable way (nervousness). While writing I realized what it
was about and I will now explore my relationship with this person
while being self-aware of who I am in his presence.
--
The fact that there was something
personal on the line increased the “stakes”: convincing someone I
know personally of my skill, of my value, is more important to me
than convincing a roomful of strangers. This is why I would, for
example, rather have my most “special” friends come see me
perform rather than have a hundred strange faces looking at me. This
is because my attachment/attraction towards a person makes them
appear “more important”: both failure and success feel “bigger”,
because I believe I risk losing the appreciation and company of a
friend if I fail in their presence, and on the other end I believe
that if I succeed in their eyes I will confirm and strengthen the
relationship.
I forgive myself that I have accepted
and allowed myself to want to “shine” in the eyes of another as I
have believed and perceived that by doing so I will “confirm” our
friendship – that the other will not want to walk away from me if I
convince him/her that I am “good enough”.
Now, this point intrigues me. It keeps
on reappearing in different circumstances and in different shapes and
sizes, but the base point is the same: “Do not abandon me. Please
don't leave me. Please tell me I'm alright.” I keep returning to
this point because I am not sure where it comes from. There are no
major events of abandonment in my childhood and I had a very
supportive family, and all that I can think of are events from later
on in my life. When I was around 10 years old all of my friends
turned their backs on me because I was “weird” (I was somehow
behaving “out of line”) and I took this sudden loneliness really
harshly. I used this event and the emotional pain that I experienced
then as a source for my upcoming depression, anxiety and
introversion. The thing that eludes me is: how did I decide to start
begging for acceptance through my skills and traits? That's not the
reason I started having friends again later on. I didn't somehow
enchant the people who became my friends: we just “ended up”
together because in a school environment you don't really have much
choice.
So what I'm asking of myself is to look
at my past and search for events where I would have felt accepted
because of a skill, trait or quality of mine that I got positive
feedback of. I find this essential because through this belief that I
can convince others to like me I have created a survival mechanism of
“pulling the tricks” to avoid facing my fear of “losing”
another person – and my dependency/attraction towards the other.
Instead of asking myself: “hang on, why do I react to the
possibility of this person not being present in my life?” I
instantly believe and validate my fear and my “need” for this
person to be around.
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